TY - JOUR
AU - Temin,Peter
TI - The Stability of the American Business Elite
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Historical Working Paper Series
VL - No. 110
PY - 1998
Y2 - December 1998
DO - 10.3386/h0110
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/h0110
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/h0110.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Peter Temin
Department of Economics, E52-408
MIT
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Tel: 617/253-3126
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: ptemin@mit.edu
AB - This paper begins the task of explaining why the American business elite has remained white, male and mostly native-born Protestants for a century, as verified in a previous paper (Temin, 1997). I argue that the evidence is inconsistent with the hypotheses that the stability is due to discrimination on the job or to principal-agent factors. The most likely explanation is that this demographic group makes the best business managers. I suggest that this in turn is not because they are inherently superior, but because they have had access to superior education, a result of past discrimination.
ER -